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Red Programming Language: Plans for 2019

red-lang.org

31–40 of 141 posts

Re: Red Programming Language: Plans for 2019

#31
post #27

The Red Language has always described itself as functional imperative . I used to point out to people that functional programming can be imperative and nobody (I do mean nobody I spoke to about this) would believe me on this. Then I would point out to people Red Language as an example and they would scratch their heads in confusion. Even the Wikipedia article gets this wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_…

> I used to point out to people that functional programming can be imperative and nobody (I do mean nobody I spoke to about this) would believe me on this. Interesting. Monadic Haskell can be quite imperative if you want it to be, as can SML or OCaml. Scheme and Lisp have imperative parts too.

Haskell's IO is literally the idea of sequencing commands reified, though, so the comparison is a bit apples-to-oranges.

Re: Red Programming Language: Plans for 2019

#32
post #18
post #2

A language with a GC does not seem appropriate for a "full-stack" language with which one would write operating systems, drivers, or game engines. I don't know why any language without full manual memory management would ever posit itself as being appropriate for these domains. It's naive at best.

All these languages beg to differ. - Mesa/Cedar at Xerox PARC - Algol 68 at UK Navy computing center - Modula-2+ at Olivetti DEC - Modula-3 at Olivetti DEC/Compaq/HP and University of Washington - Oberon, Oberon-2, Active Oberon, Oberon-07 at ETHZ - Oberon-07 at Astrobe - Component Pascal at Oberon microsystems AG - Sing#, Dafny and System C# (M#) at Microsoft Research - Java when running AOT compiled on bare metal e…

Does fuchsia contain any significant amount of low level go code? The majority code in zircon seems cpp to me.

D by Digital Mars is a language not a project.

The java use cases you mention seem very niche. Even databases written in Java ( Cassandra) started migrating a lot of parts to C++ (myrocks)

The Microsoft Research ones too don't seem like they came out of Microsoft Research to being used in shipped products.

Re: Red Programming Language: Plans for 2019

#34
post #6
post #2

A language with a GC does not seem appropriate for a "full-stack" language with which one would write operating systems, drivers, or game engines. I don't know why any language without full manual memory management would ever posit itself as being appropriate for these domains. It's naive at best.

I write kernel drivers and firmware code mainly in C and a little bit of assembler. I agree with you pretty much. That said, it's healthy to have some people exploring alternative paths. Maybe some of that exploration will be fruitful, way or another. Especially firmware development is somewhat ossified to C. C is universally supported and a lot of people in this trade don't even see need for a change, despite vastly…

C doesn't even assume that code and memory live in the same address space! The portability of standard C is almost as breathtaking as the ease with which you can introduce undefined behavior.

Re: Red Programming Language: Plans for 2019

#35
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> E.g., your idea about games is provably false since at least IL-2 Sturmovik of 2001 which was written almost entirely in Java. Oh, really? That's interesting. Do you have details? Was the main I/O loop in Java?

Unfortunately, most of the links are dead or lead to nowhere :( There was more info 10 or so years back, including class decopilers for the game. According to this Russian Post [1], it's 90% Java + OpenGL, the rest being DirectSound + DirectInput. A recent example is Minecraft :) AFAIR it's also in Java :) [q] https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=ru#!msg/fido7.ru.java/sz...

Minecraft Java Edition is 100% Java, but it's also notoriously slow, and experiences lag spikes, which are often attributed to garbage collection. I think an OS written in a GC language can certainly have adequate latency and throughput, but I don't think Minecraft is a good example of that.

Re: Red Programming Language: Plans for 2019

#36

Isn't Red a great language to teach children? I just tried Red and it's amazingly simple to get started.

Although Logo is said to be an ancestor to Rebol (which in turn is an ancestor to Red), there's more it than an apparent "childish" simplicity on the surface.

http://www.rebol.com/article/0103.html

Language that hits the sweet spot between Forth and Lisp might be a good fit for some kids, but its scope is way outside of mere scripting and toying, and demands a respective approach - something that only grown-up engineers can fully appreciate. YMMW.

Re: Red Programming Language: Plans for 2019

#37

The Red Language has always described itself as functional imperative . I used to point out to people that functional programming can be imperative and nobody (I do mean nobody I spoke to about this) would believe me on this. Then I would point out to people Red Language as an example and they would scratch their heads in confusion. Even the Wikipedia article gets this wrong: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_…

> the nesting of functions defines both the stacked structure and the resulting control flow

That's called not being functional. What distinction are you drawing between "functional imperative" and regular imperative languages?

Re: Red Programming Language: Plans for 2019

#38
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All these languages beg to differ. - Mesa/Cedar at Xerox PARC - Algol 68 at UK Navy computing center - Modula-2+ at Olivetti DEC - Modula-3 at Olivetti DEC/Compaq/HP and University of Washington - Oberon, Oberon-2, Active Oberon, Oberon-07 at ETHZ - Oberon-07 at Astrobe - Component Pascal at Oberon microsystems AG - Sing#, Dafny and System C# (M#) at Microsoft Research - Java when running AOT compiled on bare metal e…

Does fuchsia contain any significant amount of low level go code? The majority code in zircon seems cpp to me. D by Digital Mars is a language not a project. The java use cases you mention seem very niche. Even databases written in Java ( Cassandra) started migrating a lot of parts to C++ (myrocks) The Microsoft Research ones too don't seem like they came out of Microsoft Research to being used in shipped products.

Fuchsia's TCP/IP stack and file system management tooling are written in Go.

D is a project for a systems programming language with GC enabled by default. There a couple of experimental OSes like PowerNex.

RocksDB is not part of the Cassandra project, as far as I can tell.

Anyway it doesn't matter how niche they are, rather they were successful implemented and aren't mainstream as a consequence of politics and willingness to push it forward.

Doing UNIX clones is cheaper than improving the overall security.

Which is why in spite of the ergonic issues of using the NDK as it is, I enjoy the fact that Google makes it quite hard to use C and C++ instead of Java/Kotlin on Android.

Which on their little brother variant, Android Things, is even more explicit with user space drivers being written in Java.

Then we have Apple pushing Swift, which even if it takes another decade, it will eventually make Objective-C join Carbon.

Modern systems programming seems to be the land of luddites in IT.

https://fahrplan.events.ccc.de/congress/2018/Fahrplan/events...

https://www.infoq.com/presentations/csharp-systems-programmi...

Re: Red Programming Language: Plans for 2019

#39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, most of the links are dead or lead to nowhere :( There was more info 10 or so years back, including class decopilers for the game. According to this Russian Post [1], it's 90% Java + OpenGL, the rest being DirectSound + DirectInput. A recent example is Minecraft :) AFAIR it's also in Java :) [q] https://groups.google.com/forum/?hl=ru#!msg/fido7.ru.java/sz...

Minecraft Java Edition is 100% Java, but it's also notoriously slow, and experiences lag spikes, which are often attributed to garbage collection. I think an OS written in a GC language can certainly have adequate latency and throughput, but I don't think Minecraft is a good example of that.

Mostly due to bad programming practices, as already discussed multiple times in gamming forums.

Re: Red Programming Language: Plans for 2019

#40
post #36

Isn't Red a great language to teach children? I just tried Red and it's amazingly simple to get started.

Although Logo is said to be an ancestor to Rebol (which in turn is an ancestor to Red), there's more it than an apparent "childish" simplicity on the surface. http://www.rebol.com/article/0103.html Language that hits the sweet spot between Forth and Lisp might be a good fit for some kids, but its scope is way outside of mere scripting and toying, and demands a respective approach - something that only grown-up engine…

It's been 19 years since I started learning to program with Rebol, it's still my go-to language for personal projects.
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